Welcome to my new photography website, I am currently in the process of updating so you will have to forgive a few bugs, but it will be completed soon.
I mostly specialise in landscape, cityscape and travel photography, have a look at the galleries to see my best work. Recently I have also been creating artwork based on my photography. Print and canvas prints are available to purchase in the galleries.
I have photography from the UK and the US since I spent some time studying there, see the about me section for more details.
Posters, Canvas Posters and PhotoCards of my work are available to buy through www.urbanlightbox.co.uk. Please do have a look there if you like my work as there is a wide selection of images there. The galleries above also offer the opportunity to buy posters from UrbanLightbox when you have found a picture you like here.
A friend of mine found this on the internet and pointed it out to me. They are pictures that are made up of literally hundreds of individual photos taken from the same place but at slightly different times. They have then been overlaid and stitched together, kind of like a panoramic picture, but showing lots of movement and different views.
I can’t believe the levels of detail and interest that are in these pictures, they seem so dynamic and show so many different things that you could look at them for hours and still not have seen everything.
As promised in a recent post, I have now added pictures from my recent time in Devon. All of the images can be found in the Devon Gallery, I hope you will enjoy having a look.
Being on holiday I decided that I would try out a couple of new techniques, the first I have already posted about previously with the ND filters and I thought that was quite successful. The second, I thought I would try out was to concentrate on collecting a set of images of similar subjects. In this case I decided that types of doors are very varied and might make an interesting collection. Some of my favourites are shown in the gallery below. I thought that I might try and turn them into a multi-image poster of as many different types as I could find, watch out for details.
Staying just to the north of Dartmoor also allowed for some wonderful landscape photography and sunsets. The picture below of the stunning Dartmoor vista is my favourite.
Finally the many different colours of the fields in the area, be they meadow, or crops, or the bare earth, provided a vivid contrast worthy of a picture.
I shall be adding more pictures as I sort through them, but please let me know what you think of these ones so far.
On my recent holiday in Devon I discovered just how useful a Neutral Density (ND) filter can be. While I was there I was trying to take pictures of waterfalls there I wanted to try out the effect of making the water look silky smooth. To do this I needed an extended exposure time so that all the movement blurred out. I minimised the size of the aperture that I was using to reduce the amount of light entering, however I could still only use a shutter speed of about 0.3 of a second, and this just wasn’t producing the effect I wanted.
To get around this I have recently discovered ND filters, they are dark glass filters that reduces the amount of light getting through by a number of stops. You can get them in varying strengths depending on how much you want to reduce the light by. For what I wanted to do they were prefect as they allowed me to increase the shutter time to about 1.5 seconds and hence blur all the water producing a very nice effect.
Also connected to ND filters are ND Grad filters. These perform the same effect, reducing the amount of light, however they are clear at one side, dark at the other and graduated in-between. These can be useful if you want to take sunsets and still have foreground details, since the sky will be very bright. I plan to add these to my list of camera accessories that I want.
Another place I want to try using an ND filter is at the coast, to create the same silky water effect.
Finally I recently read in a magazine that ND filters can be good for taking photos in crowded places. Set up and use a dark ND filter so that you can extend the shutter time to 15 or 30 seconds without over exposing. That way all the moving people in the picture will magically disappear!
Below are some of the photos I have taken using this effect, you can clearly see the difference the ND filter makes, allowing a longer exposure for the better silky water image, while not causing over-exposure.
Do check back again soon as I will be adding pictures from Devon shortly.
I received a Gorillapod for my birthday. For those who don’t know this is a small tripod with movable legs that you can twist around things to attach to poles or make a level platform on any surface. It has to be one of the most useful additions to my camera kit. It is small and easy to carry anywhere and provides a stable platform for my camera. No longer do I have to precariously balance it on any flat object to take those difficult low light shots.
When coupled with use of the self-timer feature this can provide a quick and simple way to take fantastic low light shots. Even balancing the camera on a nearby wall or against a lamp-post can work, the important thing is that using the self-timer means you don’t jog the camera when you take the picture.
If the place you have the camera is stable it also means you can take pictures with a longer exposure and larger aperture, rather than increasing the ISO, which results in a less noisy picture.
Have a look at the New York gallery for an example of good night photography.
Most cameras will let you set the self timer for only 2 seconds so that you don’t have to wait forever, and this is extremely useful.
More night photography is on my to do list, so watch out for more interesting cityscape pictures coming soon.
These are a couple of the shots I have taken using the above technique,
Boston Skyline, Night
Port of San Francisco Building
As I mentioned in a previous post, in addition to my new digital artwork I have now been working on Hand Painted InkArt. These are based on my photographs which have been reprocessed into outline drawings and then printed onto canvas. The canvas is then painted using thin acrylic paints to maintain the outlines while creating a hand painted piece of original artwork.
You can have a look at them here in the new Hand Painted InkArt Gallery.
These are available as prints in two sizes. A 5″ x 7.5″ size print on art paper and an 18″ x 12″ limited edition size both as a canvas print and an art paper print. See the pricing page for details. The originals (usually 18″ x 12″ on canvas) may also be for sale at some point, please contact me if they are something that you would be interested in.
As always let me know what you think of them.
Below are a few examples of what I have been working on, some of them are not completely finished but they should give you a good idea. When they are finished they will appear in the gallery. If you are very interested in the ones below do contact me.
As promised I can now publish the prices and available sizes for my artwork. Artwork includes PhotoSketchArt, PhotoInkArt, PhotoMosaicArt and Hand Painted PhotoInkArt.
| Picture Size |
Mount Size |
Price |
Notes |
| 7.5″x5″ |
10″x8″ |
£10 |
Mounted Digital Print |
| 18″x12″ |
N/A |
£30 |
Rolled Limited Edition (250) Digital Print |
| 18″x12″ |
24″x18″ |
£50 |
Mounted Limited Edition (250) Digital Print |
| 18″x12″ |
N/A |
£40 |
Rolled Limited Edition (100) Canvas Print |
| 18″x12″ |
N/A |
£60 |
Stretched Limited Edition (100) Canvas Print |
These sizes and prices are for all my artwork prints, including my digital artwork and Hand Painted PhotoInkArt. The originals of the Hand Painted PhotoInkArt are also for sale, please contact me if you are interested to find out the prices.
These prints are now available to order through this website in the same ways as the photographic prints. When viewing the prints in the artwork gallery select the size and type of print that you would like.
Anyone who has looked through my gallery will have found that I quite taking pictures of beach huts. There are many around the country (and the world indeed) but some of the best know and most photographed are the ones in Southwold, Suffolk.
I choose to comment on this today as I found this article on the BBC News website pointing out just how expensive they can be!
While they may be expensive (I have had customers on my market stall saying they have know people where the choice came down to a beach hut, or a 28ft yacht!) they are also incredibly photogenic. They are all different colours, some are even works of art in their own right. They provide some interest to a picture, foreground details, or a brilliant surface to capture the fantastic sunrise light on the East Coast.
These are some of my favourite Beach Hut Pictures, for other have a look in the galleries.
PhotoInkArt is another form of digital artwork that I have been playing with. It is again based on my photography and uses Photoshop to turn images into line drawings by picking out the edges in the picture.
Picking out the required level of detail can sometimes be tricky and can require the merging of multiple layers, one to pick up the obvious lines and another at a stronger level to pick out the fainter lines (if only the second were used then the obvious lines would be very thick and dominate the picture).
Like the SketchArt this technique is well suited to architectural type subjects with lots of line detail. It can also be used with a watercolour wash effect to create a watercolour pen and ink type piece of artwork. This is accomplished by making the line layer transparent and using a blur effect on the original image underneath.
If this is an effect that interests you then please have a look at my PhotoInkArt Gallery where I shall be adding works as I create them.
Below shows the sequence of changing a photograph into a piece of PhotoInkArt.
Like the PhotoSketchArt these will soon be available to order as small prints in size 7″ x 5″ and large limited edition prints in 18″ x 12″ size, watch out for further details.
I have also been working on a variation of PhotoInkArt but details of that will appear in a future post.
This is the first of three posts about my new artwork, this one focusing on PhotoSketchArt.
As I mentioned already all of this new artwork is based on my photography and enables me to make use of pictures which may not make the best photographs but make very interesting pencil drawings.
Having taken the photograph I then use various tools in an image editor to transform it into a sketch. Several things can be controlled during the process, including the level of detail picked out, the darkness of the final sketch and crucially, as in true sketching, details that don’t contribute to the picture can be carefully removed. All of this serve to create a very interesting final image.
This technique is particularly well suited to architectural subjects, as they have lots of fine line detail. This is why it works well for Cambridge colleges and other buildings of that style.
I am planning to add a series of posters using this technique very soon, incorporating many different images of Cambridge into the same poster, possibly around a theme like bridges or college entrances. Watch this space for further details.
To see PhotoSketchArt I have created so far please have a look in the PhotoSketchArt Gallery.
Below is a series of images showing the transformation from photograph to PhotoSketchArt.
Early next week these will be available to order as small prints in size 7″ x 5″ and large limited edition prints in 18″ x 12″ size, watch out for further details.
As of yesterday, seven of my photos are on display in the bar at the Old Fire Engine House Gallery and Restaurant in Ely. The images are all of the beach at Hunstanton and will be on display until the end of August. Please do go and have a look and let me know what you think. The images on display can also be seen in the Hunstanton Gallery.
